EDWARDSVILLE — A Madison County associate judge Friday allowed the continuance of a case filed by a Republican poll watcher who said she wanted to make sure the coming election was done in a fair manner.

The suit was filed by Republican Jean Bedalow, of Collinsville, against Madison County Clerk Debra Ming-Mendoza. Associate Judge Tom Chapman approved a continuance at the request of the plaintiff’s attorney, Ed Moorman. He filed a motion for continuance after Mendoza’s attorney filed a motion to strike and/or dismiss the case.

Defense attorney Jeff Ezra argued in a motion to dismiss that, “Plaintiff has provided no factual or legal support, was not appropriately done in the past, would serve only as a political ploy and have no actual legal justification.”

Before the scheduled hearing, Bedalow told a reporter that when she was a poll watcher at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville in 2016 she was unable to obtain an electronic record of the results. She said such a record would allow poll watchers and/or candidates to check the results to ensure they were accurate.

An electronic tape of the results is supposed to be placed outside the clerk’s office, she claimed.

After Chapman granted the continuance, Bedalow complained that the election would be over by the time her complaint was heard, but she still plans to persist.

“I want to be heard,” she said.

Bedalow said she was encouraged to file the suit by Dwight Kay, a Republican candidate for state representative. Kay served as state representative of the 112th Illinois House District for six years before being defeated by Democrat Katie Stuart in 2016.

In an interview after the judge’s ruling, Bedalow said she was disappointed that the matter was handled by lawyers without any input from her. She said that, even her own lawyer did not tell her there was discussion of the case.

The information about the electronic record was gleaned in an interview with Bedalow before the hearing Friday.

However, the complaint filed on her behalf differed from her verbal account.

The complaint said Bedalow was assigned as a poll watcher at a precinct at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. She was allegedly told the ballots were not at the university but at a place unknown to the people to whom she talked.

The complaint said that when she and other judges and poll watchers appeared at the clerk’s office at 7 p.m. on election night 2016, they were told the count was complete and the office was closed. The suit was filed in pursuit of an injunction preventing votes behind closed doors, moving ballots to unknown locations without full disclosure, counting ballots at times before the polls close “and all other conduct declared by the court to be inappropriate.”

The case was filed Oct. 24. Ezra, on behalf of State’s Attorney Tom Gibbons, who represents county officeholders in civil matters, filed a motion for an immediate and expedited hearing soon after the suit was filed.

In it, he said the complaint is insufficient, filed less than three weeks before the election, and “alleges what appears to be something akin to the mid-term elections.” “Such is difficult to discern, since the complaint is so in-artfully drawn,” the motion states.

In asking for an expedited hearing, Ezra wrote, “That in order to reduce this ‘issue’ from being a distraction in the upcoming elections; to stop perhaps unknowing and/or unwitting citizens from being used as a political tool by hacks who would attempt to use the filing as a weapon; to assure the public of the sanctity of the election process; to allay the public from fear-mongers who cannot rest on their own laurels before the electorate; to prove the allegations of the ‘complaint’ false, misleading an an affront to the notions of fairness, the defendant requests an immediate/expedited hearing to ferret out to prove false the specious allegations made in the complaint, as well as the motivations attendant thereto.”